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My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.

Vladimir Nabokov

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Vladimir Nabokov
Age: 77 †
Born: 1899
Born: January 1
Died: 1977
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Chess Composer
Chess Player
Journalist
Lepidopterist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
St. Petersburg
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Vladimir Sirin
Vl. Sirin
Wladimir Nabokoff-Sirin
V. Sirin
Heart
Mind
Prefers
Russian
Speaks
French
English
Ears
Speak

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

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I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.
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No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.
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I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life.
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while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
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Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
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Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
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Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
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Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish.
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Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!
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My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
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Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
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Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
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Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
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It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
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It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.
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Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.
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My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God but was I free?
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All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter.
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The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
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Do not be angry with the rain it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
Vladimir Nabokov